Today’s construction work has chased them all away, but usually, there’s a bunch of those small, urban brown birds who hang out in the trees and on balconies chattering to each other. I’m not sure what kind of birds they are – think they’re tits, but they don’t seem big enough to be tits. That’s okay, I prefer small tits.
There’s some crows, but they hang out by the street, tracking future roadkill. A few months a go, a pair of raptors circled overhead, and the local crows were harassing them and squawking at them in a territorial manner. But I don’t think the hawks even noticed.
Every so often, a flock of seagulls will fly overhead and shit all over everything.
currawongs
Occasionally in the immediate vicinity there are Australian white ibis, butcher birds, wattle birds, channel-billed cuckoos, crows, and no doubt others I can’t think of right now. Not bad for a suburb only a few k from Sydney CBD!
thousands of (literally) blackbird are roosting in my pine trees and Magnolia tree. I think there is a layer of blackbird poop 1/4 inch thick. Farcking birds.
Speaking of which. Time to slam the BBQ gas grill to spook them.
Alas, the swallow-tailed kites which nested in back of my apartment building the last two years have yet to make an appearance-I did see one last week, but last year they were all over the place. Unfortunately, we had an early tropical storm which caused their nest tree to sway far too much in the wind, and they couldn’t land to feed their chicks (saw them carrying a dead rodent).
Gorgeous day here in GA, and it’s feeding time in the backyard.
Right now:
6 goldfinches
2 eastern towhees (mating pair, always together)
3 doves
2 brown thrashers
5 chickadees
a yellow bellied sapsucker on the hickory tree
a couple of brownish sparrows (I’ve given up id’ing sparrows)
2 titmouses
Couple of hooded crows and an orange-beaked black bird that looks like a fat redwinged black bird without his stripes (busted down?) In Austria, so I don’t know.
When visiting an Audubon park in Alabama where my wife (first visit to States) kept asking me about the birds, I identified what I could. When she asked me about that brown bird thrashing about in the leaves I told her it was a brown thrasher. She looked at me, and said as only a Brit can, “no, really what is it called?”
Grackles. Always grackles. Go to the grocery store at night and you can see their hookup spot - every night, flocks and flocks of grackles descend upon the HEB like it was Studio 54 and do nothing but talk to each other and, I presume, hook up in the back ally after doing some blow in the bathroom.
Those little brown birds too.
None now, but we have some hawks living around here. You see them flying on occasion. I saw one pick up a small skunk and, about 20 feet up, realized his mistake. Let’s just say that was a situation where the skunks defense mechanism did not help at all.
Starlings (god, they are such thugs) and sparrows – male downy woodpecker just left and the female cardinal is up in the crape myrtle awaiting her turn at the feeder (effin’ starlings).
